1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to command and control of a system for coordinating multiple land units which rapidly bore small diameter access holes through the ground materials to specified locations.
2. Discussion of Related Art
In various emergency situations, it is necessary to quickly and accurately provide an access hole to underground voids or objects. In situations where miners are trapped beneath the surface, speed is critical to provide air, or to pump out ground water to keep them alive. This would be the first step in the rescue operations.
Speed is also critical in other emergency situations such as in neutralizing underground terrorist weapons or bunkers. These must be neutralization before the enemy can take countermeasures.
In the case of an underground weapon or bunker, the prior art solution was to drop bunker-busting “bombs” on the surface above the underground target. These typically may be buried under up to 100 m of earth and stone.
Obviously, the prior art bombing techniques would not be suitable in situations where one would like to recover people, devices, materials, and information in the bunker unharmed. Therefore, underground rescue attempts for people trapped underground, such as miners or earthquake victims would have to use other means.
Also, these prior art methods would not be appropriate in situations where one would like to recover devices, materials, and information intact and undamaged, that were stored underground, such as in an underground bunker.
There are systems which employ single drilling units, or a number of these single drilling systems. Since these are not designed to coordinate with each other, it is simply several systems drilling without coordination, communication or interaction with the other systems.
The system is intended to be deployed in rough or inaccessible terrain. In rough mountainous terrain, they may fall into trees, off cliffs, or roll down steep inclines.
In the case of an earthquake, the roads and bridges are destroyed. In the case of a battle scenario, the roads and bridges are destroyed, and in addition, there are enemy entities trying to disable the drilling units.
Due to the above problems, the systems may be dropped from aircraft. In this deployment, there is the additional problem of being destroyed on impact.
If each is pre-programmed to image a region and bore to a given target, if one is lost, so is the imaging relating to region for which this was programmed. Also, since this unit is disabled, it will not be boring to its pre-programmed target.
Therefore, there is a current need for a fast, efficient method of using multiple land units to rapidly image and bore to underground objects or voids.